Scarred for life

It was largely ignored on its release in 1983, but Scarface has become such a cult movie that its recent re-release on DVD was treated as an important premiere, reports Hap Erstein.

It is the last reaction you would expect. As rangy, muscular Steven Bauer recalls the premiere of Scarface, the film in which he made his feature debut 20 years ago, tears start welling in his eyes.

"Forgive me, I get emotional about it," Bauer says softly, pausing to regain his composure.

"At the premiere Martin Scorsese turned around in the middle of the film, and he said, 'You guys are great - but be prepared, because they're going to hate it in Hollywood.' He said that to me and he didn't know me from Adam.

"And I said, 'Why?' He said, 'Because it's about them.' "

Whether studio executives perceived Scarface - the excessive, gory fable of a Cuban emigre's rise and fall in the drug trade - as a metaphor for their own cutthroat ways, the movie was certainly scorned by Hollywood insiders and movie critics.

A review in The Los Angeles Times, for instance, called it "one of the largest empty vessels to float on an ocean of celluloid." At Oscar nomination time, director Brian De Palma, screenwriter Oliver Stone and stars Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer and Bauer, were ignored.

But over the years, moviegoers have turned Scarface into a cult classic. They quote the expletive-laced lines of Pacino's drug kingpin, Tony Montana, and catchphrases such as "Say hello to my little friend". Hip-hop stars have modelled their homes and videos after the florid "gangsta" style of Montana's Miami compound.

So, for the 20th anniversary of Scarface, Universal Pictures has made a big splash, issuing a double-disc DVD, with commentary from hip-hop entertainers such as Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, who admits he's watched the film 63 times.

The hoopla comes as no surprise to Bauer, 46, who played Tony's sidekick, Manny.

Not a day has passed since the film's 1983 release that fans haven't stopped to tell him of their affection for Scarface.

"Over the years, I lived with this thing. It hasn't gone away," he says, his voice gaining in passion as he discusses the film at a Miami Beach hotel. "I go on interviews. I meet producers, filmmakers famous for lesser films - it's all subjective anyway - but every day people say, 'By the way, Scarface is the best, Scarface is our favourite film.' "

At a post-Oscars party last year, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck recognised Bauer and approached him. "They came up to me and they launch into a scene, knew all the words, between Tony and Manny," Bauer recalls.

People generally want to talk to Bauer about one particular scene. "It's because if you want to shoot a scene where a guy pulls out a chainsaw and he saws off the arm of this guy's best friend in front of him, you have to do it tastefully," he says, tongue in cheek, of the blood-spattered moment that had to be trimmed for Scarface to receive an R-rating.

The scene was based on a real incident that Stone found while combing through Miami police reports.

"He wrote it and Brian (De Palma) said, 'OK, so we need a chainsaw and we need a prosthetic arm. Build me an arm, we gotta have the blood. We'll shoot his face, but we've got to see the saw going into his arm.' "

Once the scene was captured on film, De Palma then played a game of brinkmanship with the Motion Picture Association's ratings board to see what he could get away with without incurring an X.

"I think there was a lot of publicity about it because somebody wanted the publicity," Bauer says.

He recalls plenty of dark humour on the Scarface set, even while shooting the chainsaw scene. "Oh, yeah, absolutely, but Brian De Palma is very matter-of-fact about it. His art is very, very important to him, but he doesn't belabour it. It's like, 'OK, we're shooting an arm getting cut off. Guys, can we get it right so we can go to lunch?' "

Pacino took Bauer under his wing and they spent their days on the set together, relating to each other in character. "We had our own life as Tony and Manny, and we were like boys, playing together all the time," Bauer remembers fondly. "Laughing, joking, jokes about our lives, as the characters. It's not that we were Method or arrogant or anything, we were just having a lot of fun. We were Tony and Manny, on the streets of Miami, living it up."

But Bauer turns serious at the suggestion that some people on the Scarface set lived it up too much, mimicking the characters' drug use.

"Absolutely not," he says. "And I'm not giving you the party line or anything. I never saw anything like that."

The cast or crew was certainly not snorting the mountains of cocaine on the set, because, Bauer confides, it was actually powdered baby laxative. "So much so that no one would want to put it up their nose," he chuckles.

Manny's background was not a complete exercise in acting for Bauer. He is also an immigrant, born in Havana as Esteban Echevarria. He fled to Miami with his pilot father, schoolteacher mother and a brother at the age of three.

Years later, when he accepted his destiny as an actor, he adopted his mother's non-ethnic-sounding maiden name. As Bauer puts it: "At the time there was a lot of resistance to Hispanics and a lack of imagination in Hollywood. Let's face it, you could either be a gang member or a gang member."

After studying acting at the University of Miami and with the renowned Stella Adler in New York, Bauer was eking out a living delivering kitchen cabinets in Manhattan when the call came to audition for what would be his breakthrough role as Manny - a gang member.

"So here it is, I had this golden opportunity, and as we're doing it I'm thinking, 'Oh, my god, these characters are so wild. How are people going to react?'

And there was tremendous backlash," he says. "It was 1983 and, if you remember, Terms of Endearment was the big movie of the year."

Scarface was largely dismissed as an excessively violent mess, especially its famous bloodbath of an ending.

"It's violent," agrees Bauer, "but for a reason. I don't think it's gratuitous. If anything, I think there is some restraint. It's not a documentary. It's like opera."

The Cuban community complained, both for the way they were depicted as criminals and for the fact that most of the prominent roles went to such Italian actors as Pacino, Robert Loggia and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

As Bauer notes: "It didn't matter what they were. The point was they chose the best actors for the roles. If we were doing a documentary, they'd have to use Cuban actors. The point is it was Al's idea. He went and saw (the 1932 Paul Muni film) Scarface. It started with him. He said, 'That's a great story'."

Over the years, Bauer, who was once married to Melanie Griffith, has appeared in dozens of feature films, including De Palma's Raising Cain and Primal Fear and Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning Traffic. But none has brought him close to the recognition he got for Scarface.

To some extent, Scarface has overshadowed Bauer's later work, much of which he concedes was badly chosen. He admits he became too involved in the Hollywood party scene.

Nowadays he is philosophical about what might have been. "I'm at a point now that the perception of it is everything, the perception of whether all that was in my way or that was simply my path. Now I feel like I'm back on track."

That is why the elevation of Scarface to cult status is so satisfying to him. "It's a redemption, a vindication."

Today when he looks at Scarface, it is with unalloyed pride. "I see that we did something, that we committed to a style and an energy. We don't waver from it and we don't apologise. None of the performances tiptoe at all."

He can recall being on the Scarface set with Pacino as if it were yesterday. "I would go back into the trailer with Al and I'd say to Al - in an accent, because we always talked that way - I'd say to him, 'What are people going to think when they see this? We're the protagonists of this film and we're these wild guys. Are people going to be repulsed?'

"And he'd say, 'Don't worry about it. It's something new. They've never seen anything like it and probably never will again.' "